My Patent Pending Road Trip Game

In February of last year, I came up with a road trip game. Actually, this does not have to be played on a long trip, but it is great at generating talk for long periods.

I came up with this game as I was driving to the CRP convention (a political meeting) in the spring of 2009. I stopped to collect Derek in Carpinteria near Santa Barbara before continuing up the 101. To give the complete freeway route, it was the 405 north, to the 101 north, to the 152 East, to the 5 North to Sacramento. I drove over 1,000 miles round trip and spent most of it (~80%) transporting Derek. Before we started this game, Derek was engaged in texting Rohit our progress in the trip. Considering Derek's level of texting experience, writing a text was a prolonged source of entertainment for him.

The Game
The person who starts picks up his phone and asks the other people in the car for a letter. If an R is called out, the person with the phone will go to the letter R in his stored phone numbers and talk about the first person listed under R. For example, the phone person (narrator from now on) will explain how he met that person. This will continue to any interesting stories about the person, what the person is doing now, and the last time he or she was talked to. If anything is unclear, people can ask the narrator questions to clarify the story. After the first person under that letter has been talked about, the narrator moves to the next person and continues in the same manner. The narrator will continue this for a few letters, depending upon the size of the phone book, and then the next person will become the narrator and be given a letter to start telling stories about from his phone.

If the people playing have a large amount of friends in common, everyone can contribute stories about the same people. If there is a lot of difference in who the people know, there are many more relationships that need to be explained. It is a win-win situation.

While this should be obvious, the narrator should tell stories but not engage in gossip.

This is a great game for me to play. I am skilled at telling stories. Also, I almost never delete numbers from my phone. At my last count, I had over 100 names in my phone. The people I know range from kind-hearted and funny, to crazy and misguided, to strange and weird, and all-around interesting. Sometimes I think I need to be a modern day Chaucer and write a new Canterbury Tales.

When I played this with Derek, I talked for 12+ hours. When I dropped Derek off, there were still 30 people I had not yet talked about in my phone.

If you ever do use this game or a variant, please let me know.